


searching for cigarettes in the zombie apocalypse

by inkandcayenne



Category: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Diary of the Dead (2007), The Walking Dead (TV), True Detective, Zombieland (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:40:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2506457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Society was always a collective delusion, Marty, but now it's even less than that. It's just an outdated relic, like the trebuchet or the VCR. We ain't got any more use for it.” Rust digs a cigarette out of the pack and lights it. “Just the two of us, Marty. Lone wolves.”</p><p>He mulls this over. “How can we be lone if there's two of us?”</p><p>“It's just like you to argue semantics in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	searching for cigarettes in the zombie apocalypse

He doesn't see stuff much anymore, and when he does it's usually—abstract. Swirls of smoke and color. Swarms of imaginary insects. Trees on fire: symbolic, psychedelic, apocalyptic.

This, however, is not abstract. It is very _concrete_. It is, in fact, a woman in a Saints t-shirt and matching gold flip-flops biting a chunk out of the neck of the fifteen-year-old bag boy at Piggly Wiggly. That's not the sort of thing your brain, however meth-addled, just _invents_. Nevertheless, he hasn't seen a human being bite another like that since his Crash days, when a member of the Ruthless Bastards hit another member's motorcycle with a tow truck and lost an ear for his trouble, so his first instinct is to question his own senses.

“Marty. Is that—is she—” Suddenly at a loss for words, Rust gestures vaguely in the general direction of the screaming.

Marty pauses in picking up the plastic bags full of that week’s ration of beer and tv dinners and microwave popcorn, then turns and stares for about five full seconds—unforgivably long for a cop or even an ex-cop, but understandable under the circumstances. _My homicide practicum did not prepare me for this_ , Rust thinks.

Finally, Marty speaks: “ _fuuuuuuuuuck_.”

 ~*~*~*~

By the time they make it to the parking lot, all hell has broken loose.  A checkout girl is attacking the old woman who always brings no fewer than twenty coupons to the register; she gnaws on her arm as if releasing years of pent-up rage, her ponytail bouncing cheerfully.  A ten-year-old boy in light-up sneakers is chasing his older brother, growling like a rabid dog as he comes for him with outstretched hands.  The Starbucks in the adjacent building has caught fire.

“Is it some kind of riot? Or the avian flu or something?”

“It's not the avian flu,” Marty pants. “It's the goddamn zombie apocalypse!”

“The what?”

“You know! Like in _Night of the Living Dead_!”

“I haven't seen it.” A screaming woman runs blindly across the parking lot, ramming smack into a line of shopping carts. That's when the acne-spotted bag boy, so friendly and helpful and _not undead_ only minutes before, gets her. Rust grabs Marty's sleeve and pulls him behind a car.  He hears a chorus of screams behind them and turns to see the old guy who runs the barbershop on the corner shambling toward a group of shrieking teenage girls who still clutch Starbucks cups as they run for their lives, only Rust could’ve sworn that last week Marty said something about the barbershop being closed because Mr. Danvers had died, _heart attack or somethin,’ now I’m gonna have to start gettin’ my hair cut at the goddamn mall and while we’re on the subject, Rust, maybe it’s time you did something about that backwoods coiffure you got goin’ on there_ and now that he thinks of it, old man Danvers’ suit does look a little… dirt-stained.  

“Seriously? What about _Dawn of the Dead_? _Return of the Living Dead_? Y'know, ' _braaaaaainnns_ '?” Rust gives him a look so blank he could pass for a zombie himself. “Nothing? Not even _28 Days Later_? I mean, Audrey says that one doesn't _really_ count as a zombie movie, but—”

“Marty. Focus. And stop hassling me about my refusal to participate in American pop culture.”  He hears the screech of sirens and watches as a young officer in a crisp blue uniform opens fire on the woman in the Saints shirt.  He hits her six times in the chest and is so busy being astonished by her refusal to fall over that he doesn’t even see the checkout girl come up from behind to take a sizeable bite from his shoulder.  “What. the. _fuck_.”  

“They're resurrected corpses, Rust. You gotta shoot 'em in the head.”

“Well, why didn't you fuckin' say so?” Quick as a wink, he whips a handgun out of the back of his trousers and fires off three rounds, taking out the bagboy, Mr. Danvers, and an undead barista.  

“You got a permit to carry that thing in the Piggly Wiggly?”

“Shut the fuck up, Marty.”

~*~*~*~

Rust smokes four cigarettes in a row, cursing under his breath as he tries to guide the truck out of town.  Every avenue is blocked--by traffic, fire, military vehicles, or swarming hordes of the undead.  Marty takes out his cellphone and dials one number, then another, then a third, hands shaking. Rust doesn't have to ask who he's calling. Doesn't matter anyway; the lines are jammed.

“We've gotta get to Shreveport.”

Rust lights a fifth cigarette off the stub of the fourth.  “How the hell do you propose we do that?”

“I don't care! We gotta get Maggie! And then—”

“And then what? Drive down to New Orleans to get Audrey? Up to Chicago to get Macie? Did you _see_ that freeway? Anyway, Maggie will be fine. The girls, too. They inherited her good sense.”

“But how do you _know—”_

“She survived our combined bullshit for two decades, man. Trust me, there is nothing that can kill that woman.” Marty sees a smile quirk the edges of Rust's lips, and then the motherfucker _squirms_ and, hand before God, adjusts his trousers.

“What?”

“Nothin'. Keep an eye out for exits.  Gotta be some way to get around this.”

“Not until you tell me what—”

“I just got this mental image all of the sudden, Maggie busting some zombie's head in with a fuckin' machete.  With that look she gets, y’know, her _don’t fuck with me_ look.”

Marty pauses and lets that picture sink in. “Yeah,” he says as he tucks his phone away. “That's pretty fuckin’ hot.”

~*~*~*~

They’re headed east--Rust’s idea is to travel up the coast.  “Close enough to cities to scavenge, far enough not to have to fight our way through a crowd of them things.”  They’ve been on the road about a week now, making it toward the Atlantic slowly in fits and starts, driving at night and sleeping in shifts during the day, stopping here and there to siphon gas.  They’ve just made it over the Mississippi-Alabama state line.

Rust leans over and digs the atlas out from under the passenger seat, affixes Marty with a brief but pointed _I told you so_ look (“don’t see why you’re buyin’ that fuckin’ thing, Rust, I got GPS on the phone” he’d said only two weeks before, when the world was normal).  “Get far enough north, I reckon it’ll be too cold for those motherfuckers to move.”

“You hate the cold.”

“Well, it _is_ the goddamned zombie apocalypse, Marty.  I think I can make an exception.”

“Yeah, but I’d rather face a horde of the evil undead than have to deal with you bitchin’ about the weather.”  He looks out the window and sees a van full of undead church ladies falling on a hapless hitchhiker.  “I just feel like we should find some other people,” he says.  “Strength in numbers.”

“Society was always a collective delusion, Marty, but now it's even less than that. It's just an outdated relic, like the trebuchet or the VCR. We ain't got any more use for it.” Rust digs a cigarette out of the pack and lights it. “Just the two of us, Marty. Lone wolves.”

He mulls this over. “How can we be lone if there's two of us?”

“It's just like you to argue semantics in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.”

Marty's not sure what semantics are, but he knows that Rust would define them snottily if it was pertinent information, so he lets it alone. “Where the fuck you keep gettin' cigarettes, anyway?  We ain’t seen a store for miles that ain’t been cleared out.”

Rust just exhales.

~*~*~*~

A month later they’re on the outskirts of Montgomery, pulled over on the side of the road so that Marty can change a tire on the truck while Rust consults the atlas.  Suddenly a battered SUV with a 3 painted on the door pulls up beside them.  

“Hey, where’d you get cigarettes?” the driver demands.  

Rust gives a noncommittal shrug.  

“I only ask,” he clarifies, “because if there’s a gas station that ain’t been ransacked yet, I’d like to know about it.  Not a smoker myself.  Lookin’ for Twinkies.”

Marty instantly doesn’t like this guy.  He doesn’t like his smug jerkoff expression, his stupid snakeskin jacket, his dumb cowboy hat.  But Rust, who Marty has never seen warm up to anyone _ever_ , seems to take a shine to him.  By the time Marty’s done changing the tire, they’re so busy chatting about the relative merits of killing zombies with pickaxes vs. baseball bats that you’d think they’d known each other for years.

_Tallahassee_ , he calls himself, as if that’s any kind of fucking name.  

“You're an alright guy. We could team up.” Tallahassee spits to the side of the car. “Your little buddy here can even tag along, if you want.” As if he's doing Marty a favor, rather than trying to horn in on _their_ group.  

“We're lone wolves,” Marty retorts, realizing the moment the words are out of his mouth that it only sounds cool when Rust says it.

“Maybe he's right,” Rust cuts in. “Makes sense. Double up on weapons, supplies.”

“What the hell happened to 'society has become an outdated relic'?” Marty demands, sounding more petulant than he intended.

“Are you gonna cry?” Tallahassee asks. “Because if you're gonna cry I'd prefer to be elsewhere.”

“Listen, you Twinkie-fucking son of a bitch—”

“Am I gonna have to find a ruler so you two can compare dick sizes?” Rust drawls, leaning against the car, lighting a cigarette unhurriedly as if they're not about to get into a fistfight in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

In the end they both get their swings in but they seem to be pretty evenly matched, and half the Opelika Little League team—the undead half—shows up to ruin their fun. Afterward Marty returns to the car to nurse his wounds and his pride, and when he wakes up two hours later the Floridian dickmunch is gone, as are a good chunk of their supplies.  “I let him have a couple guns,” Rust says. “Only seemed fair, after you damn near gave him a concussion.”  One of them was Marty's second favorite gun, but he doesn't complain about it, which is his way of saying _thank you_.

Marty tentatively fingers his bruised jaw, starts the truck, and pulls it back out on the highway.  Something about that sonofabitch seemed familiar, he thinks, and then it hits him.  “Hey, don't you think he looks kinda like me?” Rust gives him a skeptical look. “No, seriously.”

“Maybe a slight resemblance.”

“Are you kidding? We could be twins.”

“I wouldn't go that far.”

“I'm better looking, though, right?”

Silence.

“ _Right_?”

~*~*~*~

They cross paths with the group just over the Georgia state line, in the woods outside Senoia.  By then it’s been almost six months, a dangerous six months at that, and even Rust agrees it would be a good idea for them to team up with someone else.  They’re a scrappy bunch, these new acquaintances: weapons always at the ready, hard around the eyes--survivors every last one, down to the boy and the baby he carries.  Their leader is a grizzled, soft-voiced sonofabitch that Marty somehow _knows_ instinctively was once a cop.  Marty and Rust can join them, he explains, if the group is satisfied with their answers to three questions.  

One of them--greasy guy in a leather vest, reminds Marty a bit of what he saw of Rust in his Crash days--interrupts.  “Where’d you get the smokes, man?  I ain’t been able to find any in months.”

“That’s not one of the questions,” the leader says.  “First--how many walkers have you killed?”

Rust just expels a long, thin stream of smoke and narrows his eyes slightly, as if he’s been asked to tally up how many breaths he’s taken that day.  Marty scratches his head.  “Shit, I don’t know,” he says.  “Forty or fifty, I guess.”  There’s a stifled chuckle of disbelief next to him.  “Somethin’ funny, you prick?”

“Yeah, sure you killed fifty of them things,” Rust says.  “And you caught a two-foot-long catfish last summer in Toledo Bend, and back in college you had a threesome with two Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.  I heard all this before.”

“Yeah, well, no one asked for your assessment, Detective.  Goddamn, ain’t like you--”

The quiet one with the long dreads and the big-ass blade is suppressing a smile, but the leader cuts them off impatiently.  “How many people have you killed?”

“What, since all this started?” Rust asks.  “Or just in general like?”

Several members of the group exchange glances.  Leather Vest grins, but tightens his grip on his crossbow all the same.  

“We ain’t killed anyone lately,” Marty hastens to clarify.  “Other than--y’know, those things.  What’d you call ‘em?  Walkers?”  

The one who’d introduced himself as Glen (nice young man, Marty thinks, too bad he seems to be with that pretty brown-haired girl, because he’s pretty sure Macie's single these days) looks surprised.  “You haven’t run into any trouble with any other people?”

“Nothin’ we can’t deal with.  Typically Rust’ll clock ‘em upside the head with something, then I’ll disarm ‘em.  Now, I only ever killed one guy and that was way back in ‘95, but Rust--well, he don’t exactly recall, on account of all the cocaine he was doin’ at the time.”

“Why?” the leader says.

“Why what?” Marty asks.  

“The DEA told me to,” Rust replies, deadpan.

They don’t get invited to join the group.

~*~*~*~

Pennsylvania’s where it all started, they say.  There’s not much left there anymore, living or undead.  Apparently most of the survivors have hunkered down in a shopping mall outside Philadelphia, but Rust refuses to set foot inside a mall, zombie apocalypse or no.  Passing by near Penn State they encounter a crew of obnoxious college kids in a shambling RV; one of them keeps poking a camcorder in their faces and demanding to know how Rust and Marty feel about the chain of events that he refers to as “the death of Death.”  The exchange culminates in Rust punching the kid in the face and Marty kicking the camera under a nearby abandoned car.  Fucking film students.

It’s November and growing cold; they should be in Canada by the end of the month.  They’re almost out of the state when, one chilly morning as they’re driving north, Rust suddenly slows the truck.  Marty looks up from where he’s reading Rust’s copy of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ for the fourth time (“shoulda raided a bookstore with some goddamn mystery novels,” he mutters every time he starts it over) and sees an old man walking up the road--slowly, but not in a zombie-type way.  He’s wearing a sandwich board that just says “REPENT” on the front and back, and he’s shouting something to no one in particular.  Marty rolls down the window to hear him better.

“When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”  

Rust pulls over the truck.  “Don’t,” Marty says.

“Just be a minute.”  

“Why do you always do this?”

“Zombie apocalypse is no excuse for superstitious ignorance, Marty.”  Rust climbs out of the truck, lighting a cigarette.

Marty rolls the window up, blocking out both the cold morning air and the sound of increasingly irritated voices.  From Rust he picks up snatches of phrase like “magical thinking” and “ontological fallacy of blaming your own shortcomings on the vengeance of an angry god” and  “the bicameral mind.”  From the old man in the sandwich board he mostly hears “HELLBOUND SINNER” in increasingly hysterical tones.  

After ten minutes, Marty reaches over, starts up the truck, and leans out the window.  “Don’t make me go to Canada without you, man,” he calls.  “It’s full of frozen zombies and fuckin’ Canadians.”

Rust throws up his hands in surrender, angrily tosses his cigarette on the ground, and climbs back into the truck.  “Fuckin’ fundamentalist bullshit.”  He reaches out and starts to push the switch to turn on the heater.  

“Wouldn’t do that,” Marty says.  “Not enough gas.  Guess you’ll just have to get reaccustomed to the cold.”  

Rust sticks another cigarette between his lips.  “Fuck that,” he mutters around the butt.  He pulls the truck out into the road, and then does a U-turn.  “Whatcha say we head back down south?”


End file.
